My cousin brought to my attention that my precious Cantu Shea Butter leave-in contains alcohol.. What!!??? alcohol, really!? yup!… it does…. along with many of our conditioners and leave-ins to my surprise. So I took to the Google, blogs and scientific journals to find out why does our conditioners have the very thing that we are trained to avoid (dryness, hard tresses, no bueno). Turns out…. ignorance is a bitch… because the ones in our conditioners/leave-ins actually are not harmful.
There are Two types of alcoholÂ
1.) Drying alcohol such as ethanol that can be found in hair sprays and in some hair gels (we do not like these)
2.) Fatty alcohols - behave just like an oil and found in most conditioners.
So about the Fat ones!
- derived from coconut oil or palm oil
- made by heating coconut oil with sodium hydroxide (but once the final product is made there are no harmful ingredients)
- They help the oil and water commonly found in conditioner to mix, they are emulsifiers
- cetyl alcohol/stearyl specifically provides a creamy consistency to conditionersÂ
What about my hair?
Turns out the fatty alcohols help hydrate the hair and makes the hair ‘appear soft’. The bonds are so big in alcohols its unlikely that they would penetrate the hair shaft, kind of like the bonds in the protein of an egg.
Summary: not all alcohols are created equal, so no worries!
Em
Cosmetic Journal
Thank you for clearing things up for us!
your welcome hon… live and you learn 🙂
awesome! duly noted…S